This program is a production of WAMC News.
From Albany, this is the Legislative Gazette,
a weekly half-hour review of New York State government and politics.
Your host is political scientist and syndicated columnist Dr. Alan Shartock,
of the State University.
In this edition of the Legislative Gazette,
we'll do something a bit different,
and take a look beyond the Hudson to legislatures and the Fari.
This has been a season for international issues on many college campuses,
including the State University of New York,
where college students have protested investment in companies doing business in South Africa.
In addition, Governor Cuomo received a report on the state's involvement in that same issue.
Rick Leopcowski has our report.
In this year's message to the legislature, Governor Cuomo called for the creation of a task force,
headed by the taxation and finance commissioner and the commissioner of human rights,
to look into the possible effects of divesting state monies in South Africa.
That task force has completed its report and has turned it over to the governor's office,
although it has yet to be released to the public.
Divestment legislation has been a topic of discussion in the assembly for the past couple of years,
and this year there have been three bills introduced.
Those bills would call for many changes,
including prohibiting state money to be invested in banks or corporations that do business in South Africa,
requiring banks to file annual reports of banking activities in South Africa,
and would prohibit public pension funds to be invested in businesses that do business in South Africa.
In addition, the legislation calls for the creation of state investment councils,
which would guide state and local governments in searching for alternative avenues of investment.
Assembly Banking Committee Chairman Herman Denney Ferrell has been a long time supporter of divestiture.
In fact, it was Ferrell's legislation that lawmakers in Maryland used to model their divestment legislation,
legislation that ultimately passed in the state of Maryland.
The concept of what we're doing, I think, is not as important to send to South Africa.
We have a criminal government there.
It is a criminal government.
If it were being tried under the rules that we set in Nuremberg Trials in 1947, they are a criminal government.
They have been able through public relations and other things that they've done to make it look like it's only a minor internal problem.
It is not a minor internal problem.
It is a major nationwide problem, world-wide problem, because we cannot allow any country in this world to do what they're doing
and call ourselves civilized if we don't do something to stop it.
The major opponent to divestiture thus far has been Republican State Controller Edward Regan, who controls the state's $24 billion public pension system.
Under the reigns of Regan, the pension fund has been on the rise, mainly due to investment performance.
Seven billion dollars of that fund are invested in stocks, mostly blue chippers like IBM, General Electric, and General Motors,
all which do business in South Africa.
Controller Regan claims divestment legislation would force investment in other less profitable enterprises,
and he says investments in a public pension fund funded by taxpayer dollars should not be used to set international policy.
Spokesman for the controller, Marvin Naylor.
It's a controller Regan's position that public pension funds should not be used as instruments of international policy,
that you have a president, a Congress, United Nations, and other international organizations,
which can and should exert influence to force South Africa to eliminate this policy of apartheid.
That seems to be coming to a head. There are 20 bills in Congress right now, which would place pressures on South Africa and which controller Regan supports,
and which he will push for once they decide which bills are going to get some action.
In addition, Naylor says controller Regan has made numerous attempts to urge some of those multinational corporations that do business in South Africa to divest, or at least limit expansion.
Regan has also urged these corporations to comply with the Sullivan principles and international code of human rights.
Again, Marvin Naylor.
In fact, we've not only voted the shareholders meetings, we've written several hundred letters to the chief executive officers of these corporations, urging them to comply with these Sullivan principles,
which guarantee human rights in the workplace and elsewhere.
The results have been outstanding. He's met with the people who are through a little company which monitors corporate compliance with the Sullivan principles and pointed out where they could improve their monitoring and reporting as well.
These are going on right now. We've got more signers to the Sullivan principles. If you're dropping out, the Sullivan principles have been expanded to include a requirement that the companies actually go out in the public and lobby for the end of apartheid in South Africa.
So we are indirectly influencing positive moves to get rid of apartheid in South Africa without jeopardizing the security of the pension fund and increasing the cost to the taxpayers for these pensions.
Controller Regan contends divestment legislation would require that funds be invested in smaller, less stable enterprises, which in the long run would mean a diminished yield.
There would be fewer companies to invest in, so following the theory of supply and demand, those stocks would presumably cost more as a result of narrowing the field.
In the end, says Naylor, that would mean the taxpayer would have to pick up the slack. But Assemblyman Ferrell says the evidence he's seen refutes that theory.
I did hearings in the summer of 1983 and 1984, and at those hearings it was pointed out that every state or municipality or locality that has done divestiture, they have had their portfolios increase in value.
It happens to be that at this time and this time in the economic community that if you get rid of the multinationals that tend to be the ones that are invested in South Africa, the growth rate stocks that you're left move faster and move better and end up having a better value.
That isn't a guarantee, but at this time it appears that's the way it would be.
The deputy speaker of the Assembly Arthur E. V. Buffalo, a major sponsor of divestment legislation, predicted this week the Assembly will pass legislation prohibiting state funds from going to businesses that do business in South Africa.
But sources in the Senate say the issue has been hardly discussed. And the sources say the opposition expressed by Republican controller Ed Regan will carry a lot of weight in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Governor Cuomo meanwhile said earlier this week that he has yet to study his task force report on divestiture, but that he's eager to do so. In opening I'm Ric Leppkowski.
Gerald Benjamin is back with us this week. Jerry is a political scientist and a Republican county legislator from Ulster County.
Layoffs. That's not a word that's been heard much in Albany this year. In fact, 1985 turned out to be the best of all possible budget years.
One of those rare moments in New York history during which state government could simultaneously cut taxes and increase real spending, both through its own programs and assistance to local governments.
But you don't have to be too senior a state worker to remember 1983. When in his first budget message Governor Cuomo announced that 95 hundred civil servants would be fired in order to bring his budget into balance.
And if you experience that period, you may recall that the effects of the layoff announcement were multiplied many times because of uncertainty about who might actually be fired due to the complexity of worker rights under both civil service rules and union contracts.
As a consequence of recurring budget crises, layoffs have been employed by Governor's Rockefeller, Carrie, and Cuomo as one of several tools to control state spending.
There is no doubt that they are extremely damaging to morale and productivity, especially since many who enter government employment do so precisely because of the presumed security of public sector jobs.
But during crises, layoffs are seen by governors as a necessary evil. They are used essential to reduce the size of government.
Now however, it appears that there is doubt that firing state workers actually has a substantial effect on the size of the workforce. Despite the austerity of the Carrie years, for example, the number of state employees actually grew by about 20,000 between 1975 and 1982.
And by the time the smoke came clear to 1983, 850 workers, not 9500, had been involuntarily removed from New York's payrolls.
If reducing the workforce is the objective, then layoffs don't work, at least in anything beyond the short term.
But there may be other goals. First, a governor who must raise taxes to close a budget gap may wish to demonstrate to taxpayers that he is doing all he can to keep the gap as narrow as possible by cutting or appearing to cut state expenses.
Second, a credible layoff threat may, at that moment or in the future, allow an administration to rest additional flexibility from public employee unions in labor negotiations.
Finally, by actually laying off workers and then quickly rehiring them, the state may gain leeway in reallocating its workforce, moving people to where they are needed from where they are not.
That it just does not have under conventional procedures.
Are the benefits of budget flexibility gained through the use of layoffs or their threatened use worth the costs and the disruption of lives and services that is their consequence, especially if there is no resulting long term reduction in the size of the workforce, probably not.
And the better approach is available. How about an absolute statutory cap on state employment with new broader job definitions and work rules that would allow the governor to move people around more easily, both within agencies and across agency lines.
Reallocations might occur periodically, say once every budgetary cycle and would include all jobs vacated since the previous reallocation and some field positions as well, up to a percentage limit of each agency's total staff.
An impossible dream, not if in order to get the personnel cap and the added flexibility and the use of the workforce that he requires from the legislature and the public employee unions, the governor offers a firm and continuing no layoff pledge to state workers.
In light of the trauma of the recent past and the pattern of recurring layoffs of greater and greater severity in the first year of each gubernatorial term, this is a tradeoff that might seriously be considered.
Will it work? It does in Japan where employment caps, more flexible job descriptions and reallocation of positions among agencies have been used at both the national and provincial levels to deal with budgetary problems very similar to those in New York without layoffs.
The states and negotiations with the CSEA are over this year, but these ideas are something to think about for the next round to avoid the cycle of boom and bust and the pain this cycle brings both the state government and its employees.
This week we've heard about South Africa and shortly we'll visit another corner of the world to look at legislatures there, but first another globe trotter, Fred Dicker of the New York Post.
If there ever was a more visible example of government and confidence than what transpired here Friday morning, I don't know what it is.
At about 3 a.m., a man police later described as a religious fanatic ran a muck over at the concourse at the Empire State Plaza, carving up and painting over eight huge canvases that are part of the state's 12 million dollar collection of modern art.
He severely damaged works by such prominent abstract artists as Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Adolf Gottlieb.
State officials say that the damaged paintings are worth at least $500,000. I just came back from surveying the damage and my blood pressure is really rising.
I'm angry because people have known for years that those paintings to which the public has afforded full unrestricted access 24 hours a day were vulnerable to just the kind of vandalism that occurred this morning.
Those paintings have been treated as unwanted step children by the state office of general services which slowly but truly has been presiding over the deterioration of the ultra modern one to $2 billion complex, officially known here as the Nelthane Rockefeller Empire State Plaza.
Eugene Bert, the man accused of damaging the paintings, is alleged to have carried out his horrendous mission unburdened by the attention of the so-called police force that the state employs to protect its office complex.
From the looks of what he did, Bert must have taken a full 30 minutes to carve up those paintings without one police officer or building guard coming into view.
Indeed, the capital police force is reporting today that Bert surrendered on his own after completing his work. It just seems incredible.
Haven't these state officials entrusted with protecting $12 million of the people's art ever heard of remote television cameras or hidden sensors to protect valuable oil paintings?
Virtually every museum in the country, no matter how small it uses such devices to protect fine art.
Governor Cuomo has been known to listen to this program now and again, and if he's listening today, I'd like to ask him this. Why was a half million dollars worth of the people's art allowed to go and guard it and unprotected and as a result, suffer the ravages of a demented vandal?
Shouldn't you hold someone in your administration, answerable and accountable for such an outrage?
What steps are you going to take now to make sure that a similar act of mindless destruction doesn't occur again?
Perhaps by this time next week, the governor will have some answers and some solutions to a problem which should never have been allowed to develop in the first place.
For you, Ming at the Capitol, this is Fred Dicker of the New York Post.
There's a feeling in the English-speaking world that we not only invented democracy but have a monopoly on legislative bodies.
That's not quite true as veteran lobbyists and political consultant Norman Adler discovered during a visit to the Floreys.
You studied their institutions to some degree, how do they shape up against the New York State Legislature?
I tell you, of course, there's no comparison with China because basically it's a authoritarian regime and there's...
Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad?
It's not responsive. It's responsive to the top rather than to the bottom.
I had 300 people in Albany earlier this week lobbying on behalf of a generic drug bill in the toxic towards Bill.
And knocking on doors with the legislatures and telling them a thing or two, and you just can't do that China.
So I mean, I take China out immediately. It was great place to go and the food was wonderful and what you're doing is exciting but it's certain that it's democracy.
Now, did you pay in?
I think that the Japanese provincial legislatures are much more or spear.
It's much less easy to lobby them. Each political party has its own built-in interest groups and you just...
You know, either you're stuck with one party or you're stuck with the other.
Most interest groups in Albany are neither Democrat or Republican.
Yeah, for good Democrats and they're for good Republicans and any smart legislator will understand that and will be able to interact with them.
But that's not true in Japan.
I also had the day.
Well, let's follow up on that for one second now. What would an interest group be then? It would be of a party?
Yes, it would be of a party. In fact, many interest groups even contribute money directly into the party.
Not in terms of supporting individual candidates but supporting the party as a whole on a consistent basis being part of a factional part of a party.
And giving to one party but unlike in the New York, for example, you give to both parties that would not occur in China.
I get to all parties.
The second thing is, I think that the people are not as...
They don't feel as free to approach and talk to their legislators.
I think that New Yorkers are pretty egalitarian when it comes to their legislators.
They call them Joe and Mac and they think they're just like everybody else, you know, by and large.
And a pretty approachable...
I didn't sense that in my discussions with people in Japan.
The other thing is that Japan is a very centralized government and the provincial...
The provinces and the metropolitan areas have very little leeway with what they can do administratively.
Everything seems to come from the center and the center sends people out to work in the local areas.
And so it's much more like a pyramid than it is the way we are which is much more spread out. You don't have the decentralization.
Because it's interesting considering that the Americans literally wrote the Japanese former government.
Well, we did, but it's really hard to impose a political system that comes out of one culture on another culture.
And I think that's some parts of the American system that we imposed on Japan just never took.
Did you come away from either China or Japan with something that you thought might do well over here?
Well, I like hot tubs.
Maybe we could put one in the legislature but then people would say that it was the lobbyist fall of something.
I don't know. In terms of government, the only in China the one thing I was impressed about were meetings of entire workplaces to discuss issues.
Where everybody came together in an auditorium and the reform and work on a stage and they were basically confronting them.
And while that isn't exactly political, it was pretty impressive. I've never seen anything like that.
As far as the Japanese are concerned, the thing that really impressed me the most was that in Japan the graduates of the finest law schools
and the finest business schools go into government rather than into private industry.
Norman, you're known as a super lobbyist in the New York State legislature. What makes you super?
Is that everybody thinks that I'm a super lobbyist?
Norman, what are the dynamics of this session? Is it a boring one?
Well, at this point of the game most sessions are regarded as boring because the issues haven't gelled and the negotiations are at an early stage.
I think it'll start to get less boring as we move toward the beginning of June.
Let me ask a truth question. Are you enamored of this institution after these many years? Do you respect it?
I mean, to say, let's just like that.
Absolutely.
What's good about it?
Well, for one thing I think that overwhelmingly the people who come here from around the state, the senators and the assembly members are committed to doing a good job.
They really care about their constituents and they try very hard to represent the interests of the people back home when the laws are being negotiated and written.
Well, but it seems to me to be such an unequal place that some people get so much more than others.
Just because they have the brains to go out and get themselves a lobbyist like yourself.
Now, is that right because shouldn't people just have the right to expect that the legislature is going to represent everybody equally and that if they don't go out and organize and get a lobbyist, they'll still be protected anyway?
Well, first of all, there are lots of things that are done here that are not done because they're a lobbyist.
The interests of school children, the interests of elderly people, both of which have been faced by the legislature even at this early stage, have been done virtually with no lobbyists at all.
And then you have an issue like the toxic towards issue.
The labor movement and others have come in on behalf of the victims of the toxic.
But they didn't have the resources to go out and hire lobbyists.
It just happened that a lot of people will convince that they had a just cause.
Well, you raised it, but the labor unions will, by your own admission several times to me, go out and look for specific causes that,
that the majority of people probably would not would not like.
And yet, because you're organized, because your people are trained to know the name of legislators and to punish them if they don't do it, what's what you want them to, they could become big losers.
And so they go to a minority.
Well, I think that in Albany, Alan, the trick of the trade is always to create coalitions.
And sometimes those coalitions are created by powerless people coming together and sometimes they're created by powerful people coming together.
I really say that while some of the things that happen in Albany aren't terribly fair, a lot of things happen in Albany that are terribly surprising.
And that by and large, the money of the state seems to get spent on the needs of the people of the state.
Now, what's next for you, Norman? You are in the midst of being up in the legislature.
I hear that you're dinners, you're Monday night dinners at the talk of the town. Could you tell us a little about those?
Well, I discovered that a lot of restaurants in Albany were closed on Monday because they were opened on the weekend.
And so I started inviting people to come and have dinner in my place.
You know, three or four people, sometimes the legislators, sometimes the journalists, sometimes somebody from the second floor were the executive offices of the governor are.
Sometimes another lobbyist. And I like to cook and I cook up in the island. We get around and we talk about how to raise kids or how the Yankees were doing or whether or not you could get good tulips from the ground before the fall for us to things like that.
Anything but legislation. But of course, you're not completely altruistic. That does help you when your job is a lobbyist.
Absolutely. It does two things. Number one, it causes people like you to ask me about my dinners.
Which gets out over the air waves. And the other thing it does is it gets people to be familiar with me. When you eat my apartment, you take your coat off and you take your shoes off and you relax and you loosen your tie.
It's not like eating in a restaurant. It's much more informal and much more casual and people feel good. And when they feel good about me, I want to know what's going on. Hopefully they'll also feel good about me.
Norman, you helped Mario Cuomo become governor of the state. You functioned in one of the two or three top campaign posts.
In the middle of that campaign, you went to China. You've been to Japan lately. Let me go back and start on part A. Are you disappointed that you worked for Mario Cuomo's election?
No, I don't know. You think he's been a good governor? I think he's been... I mean, you know, my boss, Victor Gottbauer, we says compared to Watt. And compared to...
Compared to you, Carrie. Compared to the previous governor or the two guys we could have had, I think that he's fast-curried.
And one of those guys was Ed Koch, wasn't it? That's right. The other one was Lou Werman.
From the New York State Legislature to the labor unions to China, to Japan, as always, Norman Adler is able to tell us an awful lot.
In reporting, they're a specialist just as they're a specialist in the practice of medicine. I've been wondering lately whether this is a good or a bad thing.
Reporters travel in packs and are inevitably influenced by what their colleagues do. For the most part of a story is made hot by one reporter, it becomes news because competing papers can't afford to leave it out.
This papers tend to employ governmental specialists who sit up in a big room in the capital while television stations tend to employ general reporters who also cover the capital when something hot happens.
These men and women are not specialists. Many print reporters look down their noses at electronic journalists.
But ironically, it is radio and television that is the very media to which most people turn for their news.
The electronic reporters for the most part are generalists who are expected to cover dump fires for one show and the most complex legislative problem for another.
This is thought to be very bad by the prestigious legislative correspondents, many of whom think that their specialization allows them to tremendous advantage in covering the institutions of government exclusively without being polluted by the humdrum work-a-day outside news stories.
But when you think about it for a moment, a counter-argument might also be made. One might think that if you cover the concerns outside the legislature that your perspective on the legislative process might change for the better.
For example, the street reporter who has to cover a story in which hazardous waste has been discovered to be contaminating groundwater in a local community might have a better understanding about a bill authorizing toxic cleanup when he or she covered it in the legislature.
That reporter might have a better perspective than the reporter who had only been exposed to the concepts as they were articulated on a piece of paper in the form of a proposed piece of legislation.
What reporters who only cover the legislature have to worry about is myopia or tunnel vision.
Conspectors for these reporters tend to be colored by what's important to the players in government but not necessarily to those on the outside.
A majority leader or speaker for example are revered in the government as the fountain from which all perquisites and goodies of the legislature spring.
Reporters tend to attach equal importance to these players because of the values of the community which make up their frame of reference.
But outside, many of the people don't know who or what the legislative leadership is.
Many of these men and they have been exclusively men, I might mention, have run for statewide office and have amazingly lost despite their incredible power within the legislative process.
The inside reporter who only cover state government might be expected to make more of the pronouncements of one who had the respective everyone within I or Earshot but the outside reporter might have the ability to size up the story in a true or light measured against all that was happening on the outside that might be considered new.
The more television reporters tend to be paid a great deal more than print reporters. That tends to keep them around a bit longer than the fast turnover print journalists who are always coming and going.
So while they are not always around state government, it is also true that TV reporters have been down to the capital enough times over the years to understand that the dimensions of the death penalty or a new bond issue or an equal custody law are really not different this year than last year.
Specialist versus generalist, it is much a problem in reporting as it is in medicine from where I sit, I'm coming around to the view that an all around reporter brings a needed perspective to coverage of the legislation.
That's our show for this week. Join us again next week for another look at government and politics. Those are all the Edison producers this program.
Rick Lutzowski is a associate editor. Please address comments and questions to us at WAMC. Box 13,000 Albany, New York 12212. I'm Alan Chartock.
The legislative Gazette is a production of WAMC news. Alan Chartock is executive producer. This program is made possible with funds provided by the State University of New York College at Newport.
